TutorLink

Welcome to TutorLink
How It Works
About Us/ Mission Statement
Meet the Team

Inspiration

We were inspired by the both the the lack of accessibility when it comes to affordable tutoring and the service hour requirements of high school and college students in service organizations or honor societies.

What it does

TutorLink increases access to learning by connecting local high school and college tutors in need of service hours with students around them.

How we built it

We claimed the TutorLink.space domain from Domain.com to use as the font end user interface for our website. We then coded the back end Java code for how to sort the registration data given a text file.

Challenges we ran into

We has trouble connecting Domain.com with our back end system to collect the registration data. At first we tried using Google Apps Script to edit a Google forms type survey that would open in an external browser via link. However, since we were unfamiliar with the software we decided to just start coding for what the Java implementation of the code would look like.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the challenges we ran into, we're proud that we were able to come up with an idea that has the potential to bring greater access to education for those who may not be able to afford it. Additionally, we're proud that we were at least able to build the majority of both the front and back ends in spite of not being able to successfully connect them.

What we learned

Being relatively inexperienced with web development, we learned a lot from building TutorLink. Through domain.com, we learned about the process of purchasing a website domain and implementing website design. We also learned about app-script and SQL in the process of developing our matching functionality based on data. Upon realizing that it may not be feasible to collect data directly from the front end at this time, we decided to use Google Forms as a temporary alternative. Next, as we worked on a Java implementation to process this data, we learned more about the capabilities of using Java to parse through spreadsheet data in csv form. Overall, we certainly learned a lot from this experience!

What's next for TutorLink

Currently the back end has not been fully connected to the front end, so TutorLink employees would have to manually input the information from the google form into the program to search for a match. Ideally, this would be automated so that as the users fill out the form, they are matched up and sent contact information of their match via email. This would be done with the Google Forms/Sheets API and SQL for persistent data storage, as the data is currently being stored in ArrayLists. We also have plans to implement a filter to search by location, as attending the same high school, for example, could provide valuable insight as to how the class is taught in practice.